Given the opportunity, He will trim the unproductive suckers and shape the branches so each one will bask in Sonlight.

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Ya gotta look at "The Big Picture"

Snake-Eyed Rupert looks up, and gapes at the 22 calibre automatic in Big Georgy’s fist, pointed right between his eyes. Rupert’s sphincter nearly releases, as he’s caught with his hand where it shouldn’t have been. He starts fast-talking, “Hey, Georgy,” says Rupert, his raised hands shaking slightly, “It ain’t what it looks like … ya gotta look at the big picture here.”

“What part of the ‘Big Picture’ says you weren’t stealing from me, Rupert?” Big Georgy is speaking through clenched teeth.

The Little Picture

We human-type animals suffer from the same myopic perspective as the rest of creation. Our personal little world, discernible through our five senses, is all there is. Even if our world view expands to include the physical universe, only what we can see, hear, touch, taste and smell, even through the augmented sensitivity of scientific instrumentation, seems real to us.

Though we typically maintain that myopic outlook, human beings are unique in our need to ask a single question of life. Peggy Lee popularized one expression of that question in a 1969 song entitled,Is That All There Is?

Atheists, in their occasional moments of lucidness, insist mankind’s answer to that eternal question is religion. Though I disagree with virtually all of atheism’s other assumptions, I’m afraid I must concur with that one. Human religion attempts to answer Peggy Lee’s haunting question by inventing some of the most ingenious myths in folklore.

Some may ask, “How can this guy agree with that fundamental, atheistic ideal while disagreeing with everything they stand for?”

Simple enough answer: “I said, ‘human religion.’”

Now, the astute reader may also ask, “Isn’t all religion human religion? Have you ever seen a religious chimp?”

While chimps can be taught to kneel beside their beds and reverently join their hands and close their eyes, if they are religious, they’re pretty tight-lipped about it. The point is, religion is indeed a human invention. It is our attempt to formalize and ritualize our beliefs in deity. But we universally rebel, often violently, at the merest suggestion that our religion—regardless which it happens to be—is not God’s(or the gods’) honest truth.

So … what is the honest truth?

“Truth is stranger than fiction.”

Or so they say, but that depends on how they define strange. To those whose concept of subatomic particles places the electron as the smallest, the truth might seem truly strange.

“Elementary particles, my dear Watson,” Sherlock patronized.

Physicists have finally quit declaring each subatomic particle they discover, “The smallest of all.” Even they must eventually admit there’s a whole lot more to the universe than they can detect and measure. Quarks, leptons and gauge bosons defy even the scientists’ ability to imagine their size. In fact, “size” and “mass” become meaningless on that scale. Yet, their mathematics show such things must exist.

The Big Picture

If our universe contains inconceivably small things, why can it not contain inconceivably large things? And if the smallest things can change science’s distinctions between what is, and what is not detectable, could not the largest things in the universe be similarly undetectable?

Naturalists and materialists pompously limit the privilege of existence to what they can understand. Never mind that in the past few years science has proven the existence of things nobody in the past could have even imagined. Reproducible phenomena that are taken for granted today were, not all that long ago, thought to be magic. And SETI radio telescope installations probe the night sky for any sign of extra terrestrial intelligence.

If big is as possible as small, and the unknown as possible as the known, why does secular science steadfastly deny the possibility that Elohim exist? Now, don’t get your pants in a bind over my poor grammar. Elohim is, after all, the plural noun in the Hebrew language that is translated as “God” in English. Yet, Jewish theology insists that Elohim is one G_d.

Confused? Join the centuries-old club. When we reach the end of our Biblical understanding of God’s nature, all we have left is speculation. And that goes on at a wholesale rate among theologians.

Trekie Theology

No one would accuse Star Trek: The Next Generation’s writers of presuming expertise in theology. Yet, they assigned god-like attributes to “Q,” who was one of several Q hailing from the Q Continuum. Q told Captain Picard that the human form the Captain saw was assumed simply because humans could not comprehend his true form.

Of course, any reasonable person must realize such fiction is far-fetched. It does, however, present an interesting take on God’s nature, striking several deliberate parallels between God and Q.

The Plausible Impossible

Skeptics poo-poo the idea of spirit-existence because it can’t be observed, measured and categorized. In their view, such a supernal existence is incomprehensible, thus, impossible. And anyone imagining such a thing is stupid or foolish, or both. Yet, they accuse religious types of dogmatic, closed mindedness.

If sci-fi writers can create stories around a god-like creature, why would anyone presume to insist that the existence of such a being is impossible? If atheists refuse to consider the possibility that The Big Picture might just include something bigger than they are, how small does that make them?